“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
— Jojen Reed, A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

A note from the publisher:

Some of my earliest memories are of running out to the mailbox, waiting for the next book to arrive from the Wonderful World of Reading. I was three or four years old and even then, that small ritual—mailbox, book, back inside—felt like opening a door to somewhere new every time. And I never really stopped.

My mother was also an avid reader and at age 11 or 12 she introduced me to Piers Anthony and more importantly, Anne McCaffrey. Since then I’ve read thousands of books over my lifetime. Everything from Anne and Piers to Patricia A. McKillip and Nancy Springer. And at age 16 she introduced me to Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, and I fell in love with Regency romances and I read just about every Regency romance I could get my hands on. And that lead to historical Fiction, where I would devour an entire Sharon Kay Penman in one weekend.

I have read so many books I can't remember them all, just the ones that become old friends. You know the kind- you don’t just read once—you return to them, again and again and have to replace them because you literally wore them out, because they still feel good in your hands and familiar in your mind.

Looking back, it amazes me how much I was shaped by the heroines I read about- I learned from them how to endure, survive and thrive in a world that is far from easy. How to stand up for myself and even how to comport myself as a lady. No heroine worth her salt would ever curl up in a ball and cave in, and neither have I.

Reading isn’t something I was told to value—it was just something I naturally loved from the start. Over time, that love turned into something else as well: storytelling. I’ve always been a storyteller, and one of my favorite things is making people laugh, so humor tends to find its way into everything I write.

Most of my stories begin the same way—something small happens in real life. A moment that catches my imagination, or something slightly odd, and from there, it takes off like a racehorse coming out of the gate. For instance, the time I checked into my hotel room and my safe was still locked. I won't lie, I sat there a few moments before I used the code to open it. I was in LA after all. But even though nothing was in it, in my mind I'd already taken off on an adventure and Give Me the Finger was born.

That’s usually how it goes. Something real sparks something imagined, and suddenly there’s a story where there wasn’t one before. All of my stories began by some absurdity in the world that just tickled my fancy.

Now I'm older and I finally making time to finish all the stories I've started and that’s where Bits of Wit comes in. It's a small, private label for my stories, but also for others who fit in with the core principal that the story comes first- everything else is irrelevant.

If you’re here, I hope you find something that makes you smile, think, or inspires you to be strong, resilient or just yourself. And to remember why stories matter in the first place, and above all else, I hope you get a laugh or make one of our characters a new friend.

That’s the point of all of this.

--Shalene Portman